We understand life through story. This is an unavoidable aspect of how we see the world. Stories define our family of origin history, our national history, our faith history, the list could go on. No matter the angle, stories help us understand the important events in time and space that construct our present reality.
Story--or narrative--and how it relates to the concept of God's judgment is our topic of discussion today. We've been working through a series of posts discussing God's judgment, or divine judgment, as told by the Bible, and this week we continue our discussion on judgment and story. (You may want to read part 1 before reading this post.)
This week's focus is on the following idea: Reading the Bible as the grand narrative (story) of God saving his people gives context to why judgment is a necessary part of life. There is an underlying assumption in this idea that we can't just put aside, because without this assumption our landing place on God's judgment could be very different. This assumption is connected to how we think about the Bible.
It might seem simple. The Bible is the word of God, right? But, even if two people agree on this, it doesn't mean that they will agree on what it means.There are at least three ways to think about this. 1) Some believe that the Bible is directly from the hand of God. Dictated to passive scribes who wrote word for word what God was revealing to them. 2) Some people believe that God spoke to authors, but gave them the freedom to write in their own words. 3) Others still believe that authors might have had no idea they were writing scripture when they composed their text. Yet, God used their story to tell the story he wanted to tell.
I stand somewhere between the second and third ideas above, especially when it comes to how we understand the Hebrew Scriptures. We have no idea how the Old Testament became what it is today. We get hints about where texts came from, but we can only guess how they have come to us in their current form. The best guess we can make is that Jews sometime after the Babylonian exile, before the time of Jesus, pulled together the stories of Israel's history into a document that helped explain their current situation. In other words, they told a story. Did these Jews know they were putting together a book that would come to influence the world? Probably not, but they did know they were telling a theological story about their people's history, and the unique relationship they believed that had with the creator of the world.
What I am suggesting is that the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, is first and foremost the story of the Hebrew people and their relationship with God. The laws are part of the story. The history is part of the story. The judgment is part of the story. The poetry and wisdom is part of the story. It all comes together as the story of Israel's relationship with God.
This story (or narrative) has a plot and characters. There is God, humans, spiritual creatures, animal creatures, and plants. There is a beginning, a purpose, a problem, and a solution. We must see the Bible in these terms if we are to understand it. Humans are important creatures in the story. We learn early on that God made them as his representative in the material world. We also learn that humans failed at their created purpose, introducing a problem into the story. This problem created all kinds of other problems. The story of God is about solving this problem and restoring humans and creation to their created purpose. Central to this problem is growing rebellion again God's created order. This rebellion is personified in a leader who attempts to trick humans into giving him what only God deserves. Another way of seeing the problem is an ordered world that has returned to chaos.
In either case, the trajectory of the story is toward restoring order, allegiance and harmony to a world in chaos, rebellion, and dissonance. In order to do this, God must judge what is good (part of his order) and what is not. In the narrative of the Bible, judgment is often described in terms of destruction. It's difficult to separate the images used to describe judgment from judgment itself, and as much as we'd like to, doing so would remove the force that judgment places in the narrative. Let me explain why:
Judgment is God's ruling on whether or not something is part of his created order for world, or a result of human rebellion.
The description of judgment--language of destruction--can only be known at the level of the story (what we talked about last week). We can't know how God will actually render judgment. What we can know is that we don't want to be on the side deemed part of the rebellion. Still, though, this doesn't guarantee how individuals in this category will experience judgment. We can't know. They might just cease to exist in a moment, or like in C.S. Lewis The Last Battle, become less than human. We can't know.
What we must understand is that judgment is fundamental to the story of God. Without it, there is no cross, there is no resurrection, there is no hope. Judgment is God naming all the evil in the world and doing away with it so we can enjoy life!
Next week we exam judgment from yet another angle.
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